


flames in-between fires

by cuddlydreamsonrainydays



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/M, First War with Voldemort, Isolation, Loneliness, Minor Character Death, Sadness, teenagers fighting a war and hating it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-27
Updated: 2020-03-27
Packaged: 2021-03-01 06:28:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,504
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23346946
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cuddlydreamsonrainydays/pseuds/cuddlydreamsonrainydays
Summary: Lily, too young to fight a war, too young to bury her parents, too young to carry a child, struggles to keep her flame burning as the world does its best to drown her.(newly formatted and hopefully readable now)
Relationships: James Potter/Lily Evans Potter
Comments: 2
Kudos: 13





	flames in-between fires

It takes courage to burn. Whether the flame is small enough to fit into the palm of her hand, its light barely reaching to her fingertips, or large enough to swallow her up whole, up to the tips of her fiery red hair so that it dances, painted flames itself, does not make as much of a difference as she used to think. It always takes courage to burn. She tells herself she is courageous. She keeps the flame going. Some days though, she barely does. The world rains down around her, the skies falling so hard that heaven and earth intermingle in the wet rush, and it seems impossible for anything still to burn, for anything to withstand the push and pull of skull-shaped clouds and poisonous green streams. She makes herself into as tiny a ball as a woman can be, hands cupped in the middle of it, and holds on to the flame. It used to be easy for her to burn. Her sister would joke about it, once she grew older and more vicious, about how she was a witch, and about how witches burn. 

It is an invisible war to most, and yet the most insidious of them. Many who fight it are oblivious to their fight, and many who fall in it do not know at whose hands they have fallen. It is fought at the very edges of society, in fact, it is fought within a different society only tangentially connected to most of the world, but the way this war tears apart that different society is so violent that the much larger rest of the world can’t help but shudder, too. They shudder blindly. 

Lily watches. This is her war, not theirs, and yet they walk these streets with almost as much fear as she does, and they talk in hushed voices like she and her friends do, and they jump higher than they should when someone clumsily drops a plate or a cup and it shatters, like the noise is deafening to them as well. It might be more deafening to them at this point. Lily has heard to many of the noises and the deafness is slowly sticking, a spell plastered over her ears and eyes and mouth and across her throat and all the way down her legs that she has to focus hard on keeping away from her. She must stay alert. She must burn. She must go on. She must not let herself be covered in apathy and worn thin until she is but a puppet, or rather a stuffed doll for a practise target; she wouldn’t be considered puppet material. She watches and she knows this war must end soon, or else the consequences will be more terrible than they already are every day. All these people cannot live their lives in fear of a war that does not exist to them for much longer without starting a war of their own, just something that will ease the tension in their minds. There will no longer be a gap between the fact that they live in a time of peace and that their hearts live in a time of war; there will be war, and many of them will not live at all. 

Lily has read about the war with Grindelwald, and Lily has read about the Second World War, and Lily has made connections that she doesn’t think many others have made. Any others to make them would have had to be skirting around the edges of both societies like her, immersed enough to know, alienated enough to see, curious enough to think, and courageous enough to watch. The war within the Wizarding society started earlier than that within the Muggle society, years earlier, and Grindelwald’s tyranny went on for so long, and had the Wizarding world shaking at its core for so long that the earthquake spread over into the Muggle world, which it shook by its edges at first and then crept further and further into the centre, until Grindelwald was finally imprisoned, and Hitler rose in a Germany that had been shaken by an invisible war for years and was ready to fight one as well. Not that the Muggles were ever innocent. These things must have happened the other way around as well. There were no similarities as evident as they were between Grindelwald and Hitler between the war because of Grindelwald and the First World War, but the earthquake of war travels both ways, as Lily is convinced. 

A year ago, when she graduated from Hogwarts, she thought she was going to be an Auror, fight in the war as soon as rushed months of training were over, and make a difference. Dumbledore had asked them and other promising students in their year, students carefully vetted, their hearts and memories studied more closely by magical means than could naturally happen even over the course of months of intimacy, because Dumbledore was not going to make the same mistake that he had made with Tom Riddle again, to join the Order of the Phoenix, which he was creating, an order of soldiers that would rise even from ashes and somehow reform, rebuild, and burn brightly again. Things went differently. 

She is a member of the Order, that far she’d been right; she and her friends all are. Not that they see each other much. She has done a few months of Auror training, too, enough to be considered a capable soldier. They’ve put in as many hours of hard work in a week as they used to in a month at Hogwarts, and those hours payed off, once they’d slept a little, once they’d had dinner at one in the morning and breakfast at six, both eaten from the same box of noodles because they were always too tired to finish it at night and their stomachs still too twisted up from sleep in the morning to eat a whole one anyways. They were lucky that the flat Lily had found and James had bought and Remus had cleaned and Sirius had decorated and Peter had simply come to live in, too, and Alice and Frank and Marlene would crash most nights was right above a shabby Chinese restaurant which was open into the late hours of the night seven days of the week. Sirius would joke about their eating habits, and since, as they were spending so many hours of the day awake and running around during most of them, they were eating at least five meals a day anyways, call their dinner and lunch respectively an early and a late midnight snack. It hadn’t exactly been a good time, but it had been beautiful. Seven of them were in Auror training together, and Alice was training to be a doctor at St. Mungo’s not far away. It was like they’d taken a bit of Hogwarts with them, with always at least three people to a room, and them being always together, and it was comforting. Lily has barely any of that comfort left, now.

Her Dad fell ill after seven months of Auror training, more than half of their sped-up program, five months to go until she would have been considered a Junior Auror, when Lily already had a whole new world of magic open to her, and encyclopaedias of charms and spells and hexes and curses stashed in the bags below her eyes. It was bad. It is bad, now. The doctors aren’t entirely sure what’s wrong with him. Lily thinks she knows, but she’s too scared for it to be true to talk to anyone about it. It might make the illness worse to acknowledge its terrible source. 

When her Dad fell ill, Lily quit Auror training. Her older sister was then blind and deaf to their father’s illness, which affected the lungs one day and the heart the next and the mind the day after that, and still is now. She left with her husband, who conveniently secured temporary employment, which was to boost his career, in an American company, never called and barely wrote. Her mother was and is helpless. She still functions, somewhat. She has had to reduce the hours at her job teaching at a primary school, and they are all glad the primary school keeps her on at all, since there is no foreseeing what Lily’s Dad will need on any given day, how he will feel. He’s self-aware enough, at least, to call when he feels a wave approaching, so that she can go to work on a good morning and know that if it turns sour, he’ll call. Sadly, he’s also self-aware enough to drown in shame. Her mother couldn’t do it alone. She couldn’t care for him and work and pay the bills and manage the house and keep herself sane all at the same time, and so Lily quit Auror training, and she came home. She wishes they lived in London, at least. But they don’t. And although she definitely has the skill, it is risky to apparate all the time, and riskier to jump to public floo stations, and riskier to get your own floo connected to the network; many people have even taken theirs off the network. Sometimes, weeks pass during which she doesn’t see her friends, who need all their free time to eat and sleep and stay alive. She works in a coffee shop, now, only a few streets over from where her childhood home stands. The house has barely changed. The bathroom smells of the patchouli soap her mother has been buying for as long as Lily can think back, and the scent seeps back into her skin as though it had never left. The living room is a little dustier than she remembers, and at her arrival at the beginning of March, the house greets her in a gloomier state than she has seen it in a while. It loses the magic of a summer home fast. Standing in their small garden, which used to be an entire fantasy landscape for her as a child, she remembers the rolling hills of Scotland. She left her childhood bedroom as it was; the bed that fits her well enough but is small compared to a Hogwarts Four-Poster, and the mirror that has silly photos of her and Marlene and Alice stuck all around it, non-magical photos stuck there with actual glue, and the wardrobe that is still mostly filled with clothing that fit her back when she was eleven and definitely doesn’t fit her anymore, plus a number of summer outfits collected during her Hogwarts summer holidays, and the black she now wears, the uniform of both an incognito Auror (as she has decided; the Aurors don’t actually do such things as incognito patrol) and a coffee shop worker. The carpet is the light blue one she picked out when she was ten, and because she’s been home so rarely since then, it’s barely worn, except for a large ink-stain by the desk. In her childhood bedroom, there are those blessed and terrible moments during which she feels like a child. The world feels new and big to her, awe-inspiring in the truest sense of the word, and she studies the traces of fear that taint it with the detached curiosity only a child’s mind possesses. Somehow, the very acute way a child feels fear, like the fear isn’t hers, like the fear is a magical being separate from her, a monster hiding under the bed, shrinks the fear down to an object of wonder. That is what is blessed about those moments. But she always finds herself stretched back into adult shape soon enough, worn a little thinner through it, and with the fear back in its indeterminate shape all around and within her, impossible to pin down. Sending owls is risky, too. They still do. James sends far too many of them, and she clings on to each letter for dear life, especially since they’re now getting send out for missions in between further lessons. 

The work at the coffee shop is easy and tedious. She always has her wand tucked inside the waistband of her jeans, in a concealed pocket she clumsily sowed into them just to definitely keep it in place, but of course she cannot use magic to do the dishes and clean the surfaces and count the cash after a long shift. At least they pay her well enough. It’s probably the best job she could have gotten, a nineteen-year-old with, on paper, no education beyond primary school. She told the woman who runs the place some half-truth about a private boarding school for select students from all over England, and because she knows she cannot exactly present her Hogwarts graduation scroll for proof that she actually did graduate from this school, she claims that its program stretches all the way through to the first years of university, and that they don’t believe in grades, and that she never did get to graduate because her father fell ill. The woman tells her rather brusquely that so long as Lily is punctual and leaves the coffeeshop spotless when she does the closing shift and sol long as the money checks out, she could not care less whether she spent the last eight years of her life travelling with a circus. Lily carries condolences for her family situation and a contract when she leaves her new boss’s office. She writes a letter to her friends that night and tries to pass the entire thing off as a funny story. She knows they will see through it, Marlene and James especially, so she scribbles on the bottom of it that they are not to worry about her, which she knows they will ignore, and then she sends the letter anyway. Working at the coffee shop at least gives her a chance to watch. People scurry in and out of the shop with their heads ducked and their papers or messenger bags or children held close to them. Or maybe she is projecting. 

Probably not, however. When she does the shopping for her mother, most Tuesday mornings because everyone else seems to do their shopping on Mondays or Saturdays, she can’t help but notice that the shelves aren’t as well stocked as usual. The store is almost out of frozen pizzas, of canned beans and tomatoes and beans in tomato sauce, almost out of pasta and almost out of toilet paper. She tells herself that a delivery must be late. The shelves are a little emptier the following Tuesday. Lily grabs extra of everything she meant to buy and two jars of peanut butter on top of that, although she knows that it’s no use. Fear drives people in a weird way. When she is at the check-out counter, she remembers that they have barely any toilet paper left and goes back for some. On her way back home, the streets that have come to be familiar to her again seem foreign. She jumps when a man nods to her, a regular at the coffee shop, like you’d jump when someone nodded to you in a town you’d never set foot into before.

She lies in bed at night and wonders when this will be over. She wishes that she could go back to Hogwarts, back to the safest place in the world. She tells herself that in human history, she could have scarcely lived in a safer time, or in a more prosperous time, or in a time at which people are safe, and free, and previously immune to great worries so much that they have all this time to worry about tiny things. She draws the blankets tighter around herself, blankets with tiny teddy bears on them (she’s not gotten around to doing the laundry yet), as she forcefully remembers that these aren’t tiny things she’s worried about. Sometimes she forgets that she’s not Muggle herself, but Muggleborn, and that this war is actually hers. She’s been removed from its front lines for so long. And not even that is the entire truth. She’s been removed from it entirely. Her Dad is fighting this war more acutely than she is. 

She wishes witches actually did always burn, because her flame is burning low. 

When she writes letters to James, she barely has anything to say. They had so little time together, and yet, even as the walls were starting to crumble around them (not the walls of Hogwarts, though; they never will, Lily has to keep believing in that at least), they believed they owned time itself. She now thinks it likely that it was true as much and for as long as they believed it. She tells him little tales about customers, most of which she makes up. It’s not as romantic or interesting or life-changing to work in a coffee shop as silly books she’d get from the library during the summer holidays always made her think. It rains a lot, but that just means that the people that come and go are wet, and that everyone puts a plastic lid on their to-go cups. There’s nothing romantic to it. But James is a bigger romantic than Lily will ever be, and he worries about her incessantly, so Lily makes up tales at the edges of which she squeezes in the truth for she hasn’t been able to lie to James in a long time now. 

The earthquakes grow bigger as James’ own letters get shorter and shorter, and the coffeeshop gets less and less customers, and both of them have to struggle to find anything positive to say. Voldemort and his Death Eaters have grown careless; they are blowing up Muggle bridges and houses, coming close to completely obliterating the Statute of Secrecy time and time again, and somehow, this is still only Britain’s problem, and none of the other nations will send help. At this point, Lily isn’t even sure if the Ministry is asking for any. Through James’ scrawled letters, his lack of sleep and the fear he doesn’t want to show are clearly visible. The Daily Prophet meanwhile is playing everything down so much that you’d think there was a Muggle, not a Wizarding war, and Lily is deeply worried about the state of the Ministry. James writes of only being able to trust their boss, no, his boss, Alastor Moody, and their Hogwarts friends, of intra-Ministry correspondence being intercepted and of several strikes of bureaucracy in the Auror department. He himself, he says, has been suspended, on account of a series of charges as silly as the overuse of the office coffee maker, but Moody keeps him doing jobs anyways. The same has happened to others. They think people high up in the Ministry are trying to weaken the Aurors, and it worries them. There’s the Order, at least. Even if the Ministry went completely bad, and the Aurors as an institution could no longer function, the Order (mostly made up of Aurors and other skilled witches and wizards) could still fight. 

James sends Lily a hastily scrawled note with a completely foreign owl (it looks like he might have just gone to an area where owls live naturally and magically induced it to come to him), telling her to leave the house as little as possible, and not to write until she receives his next note, because their lives could be on the line. Lily swallows hard and tucks the note away with all the others. She stands uncertainly on her blue carpet in her all-black outfit, her red hair (much shorter now than when they graduated from Hogwarts) tucked away under a black hat, and wonders whether she should even go to work or just quit. In the end, she goes. She serves coffee to a very grim-looking young woman and a distressed looking man around forty who always comes in and writes into a leather-bound worn notebook in tiny pencil scrawl, but this day only chews on his pencil. She serves tea to an old man with shaky hands, who tells her that his nightmares about the war has come back, and she listens to his story about the times back when they had to black out the windows at night, when the entire family would gather around a single candle, when food was scarce and the future was uncertain, and anxiety pools in her stomach. She gives him a glass of tap water and a blueberry scone for free, and he picks at it with a grateful smile. After her shift, she hurries home. Her mother isn’t home yet, working on a project at school because her father is having a good day. He sits at the kitchen table, still primly made up in his worn linen trousers, his dress shirt and light green pullover, while Lily makes dinner. His eyes are only a little sad. He tells her he is sorry, and on the same breath, he tells her how glad he is to have her home, after having missed almost all of her youth. He tells her he can only imagine how trying a time this must be for her, and how proud he is of her courage. He tries to make a Gryffindor joke, but gets the name wrong, and then he asks her to tell him about her favourite spell. Lily’s flame burns a little brighter. While the casserole is in the oven, they play a slow game of Ludo. They all eat together, her mother coming home just in time, and then watch a documentary about oceanic life, and Lily attempts to ignore the deep pit in her stomach. She tries not to think about James being out on a mission. She tries not to think about the impeding downfall of her world. 

The next morning, her father dies. 

Lily mechanically helps her mother organise the funeral. The doctor says it was cardiac arrest. He says that this sometimes happens, even though her father was barely fifty and had always kept in reasonably good shape. She writes seven letters to James and tears up each and every one of them. The doctor shrugs his shoulders apologetically and offers his condolences. She wonders what this means for the wizarding world, the world her father was so closely tied to, though not magic enough to show up on Hogwarts’ radar himself. She finally lets herself think what she’s been suppressing for so long. At the funeral institute, they ask her what her father would have liked to wear on his final rest. She brings them the outfit he wore the day before he died, and on a dangerous whim, ties her old Gryffindor tie around his neck. It clashes horribly with the green of the pullover. Her father’s soul must have been strewn with magic, bits and pieces of it all over him. Perhaps an ancestor of his was magical; perhaps a closer ancestor of his was a squib. Somewhere along his Irish line, there must have been magic, and in her father, it was almost actualised again, actualised as it was in Lily, who got all of his magic while Petunia got none. The magic was what had kept him young and excitable all throughout his life, and infinitely curious about the details of Lily’s life at Hogwarts. In the end, the dormant magic killed him from where it lay buried deep within. Lily writes another letter to James, in the middle of the night before the funeral, but no note of his has arrived yet and she worries more than she ever has that he might be dead. She is close to tears long before they bring out the coffin and spends most of the funeral crying. Nobody bats an eye. Petunia couldn’t have made it in time, anyways, and stays in America. She sends a card as though she was a distant relative, as though an unloved uncle had died, not her father. 

The next four days pass in a blur. 

Lily works two shifts, but she barely remembers anything already minutes after she has left the coffeeshop. She cooks. She cleans. She runs laps up and down the street, although the air is frosty and hurts her lungs, always watching out for an owl, just to be able to collapse into sleep at night. She mourns her father, and she mourns the loss of the magical world as a safe place with him. She worries about her mother, who seems to be aging a year per day, deep lines etching themselves across her face as though attempting to write into her skin the words she cannot find to speak. Lily, swimming with her head held high to somehow keep her flame from drowning, is helpless.

A week after the funeral, there is a knock on the front door when she is just preparing a late lunch to eat for when her mother gets home from the primary school. Lily stands frozen. People have been knocking all week; concerned neighbours, neighbours who want to seem concerned, and the occasional colleague of her Dad, wanting to deliver their condolences in person, mostly wrapped into puff pastries or oven-baked dishes of all sorts or cake. Still, panic rushes through her every time. She forces herself not to bring the knife she’d been using to cut another condolence-lasagne. It’s hard to tear her fingers from it. She assures herself that her wand is in her back pocket, safely hidden under James’ shirt, which is much too big for her, and tiptoes to the front door.

There are three locks to undo. Lily’s fingers shake harder with each of them.   
  
She opens the door just a crack. 

A solitary figure stands on their porch. Almost their entire face is hidden beneath a black hood. They’re not wearing a warm-enough cloak for the weather; their shoes are muddied, and there is a tear in their trousers above the knee through which a fresh-looking cut is visible. Lily registers all this in an instant, thanks to Moody’s training, and her hand flies to her wand. Only when she has her fingers clamped around it does she recognise the tiny bit of face which she can see.

It's James. 

It's James, but she cannot let her guard down now. The words in his letters replay in her head. Corruption in the Ministry. They fear the Imperius curse. They fear Polyjuice Potions and crafty disguising charms. They fear the way dark magic avoids their usual detection spells. Trust no-one.

James raises his head. 

Lily can barely see his expression through the tears that have collected in her eyes. There are so many things she wants to do, and at least three things she wants to say, and none of them are keeping the door almost shut in James’ face and asking him a stupid question.

“What did you stick to the fireplace with a Permanent Sticking Charm in the Headstudents’ common room?” 

“A picture of us on our first day, which Sirius secretly took, and a toy lion that occasionally roars.”

Lily opens the door wider. James steps into the hallway. They are silent for a very long moment as Lily shuts the door and turns all three locks. James takes off his hood. A fraction of a second later, as though they haven’t even moved, as though there’d never been any space between them, they’re entangled in a fiercer hug than Lily ever thought hugs could be. 

“Merlin, I’ve missed you so much,” she murmurs into the crook of James’ neck. His arms are clasped tight around her, strong as ever, but he must have gotten even skinnier. Through all his layers of clothing, she can feel that there’s not much more to him than skin and bones and a mixture of muscle and the pure will to survive. 

“I love you,” he says into her hair, his words barely audible. 

“I love you,” she echoes. 

They stand in the shadows of the hallway for a long time. Lily feels alive again, alive with all the joy and pain that are coursing through her. She holds on to James for dear life. Her flame flares at the feeling of him so close. She’s never letting go again. 

She thinks every thought she has and hasn’t been thinking in the past months at the same time and thus thinks no thought at all for a blissful few breaths. Then, thoughts make themselves known again.

“What are you doing here?” she asks, her voice choked. She’s crying for the first time since the funeral, and it seems like her entire body has slowly transformed into one made entirely of tears since then. 

“Our mission blew,” he says. “I’ve been going from supposed safe spot to supposed safe spot for the past week and a half. I had to come see you. Somebody in the Order must have tipped them off. It was horrible.” His fingers go rigid against her back. “I had to see you. I had to know you were okay.” 

Lily cries harder. She can’t see his face, but she knows that James is crying, too. 

“I’m so glad you’re safe,” he murmurs. 

“My Dad died,” Lily says. 

“Fuck,” James breathes. “Lils, I’m so sorry.” 

“It was the magic in him,” Lily splutters. “It got too violent, and his body couldn’t take it. The doctors never figured out exactly what was wrong with him, but I know. It’s this damned war.”

They stand in silence for another short infinity. 

The locks on the door turn. Both of them draw their wands immediately, letting go of each other and dropping into fighting stance. Half a thought crosses through Lily’s mind about how she’s still just as fast as James, even though she’s been out of training for nine long months, even though she’s never been on missions. They don’t even give her mother a fright. She comes in with her head ducked, looking as though she’s weighed down by the world even though she’s only carrying her workbag, and by the time she looks up, they have both long dropped their wands.

“Oh,” she says, apparently too weary for surprise. “Hello, James.” 

At night, Lily and James are in her narrow childhood bed, in her childhood bedroom, with the faded curtains drawn tight across the window. Lily’s head rests on James’ chest; with every beat of his heart, she grows more assured that he is alive, and real, and here. In the small bed, they are pressed so close together that it is hard to tell where one ends and the other begins, huddled together only in underwear and t-shirts beneath the blanket that barely covers them, assuring each other skin to skin that they are still there. 

“I always thought that I’d be fully grown up by the time my parents died,” Lily confesses. Her voice barely makes it to James’ ears. “And now my Dad’s gone. He’s gone, and this stupid war killed him, and it might kill all of us, and I’m not even twenty yet! I’m not strong enough to be a proper adult.”

James strokes her hair softly. 

“You are strong enough,” he whispers. “You’re stronger than anyone I know.”

Lily wants to believe him, she does; but she knows that if her flame is burning high right now, it’s all thanks to him.

“I know how you feel, and I’m so sorry you have to feel this way,” James goes on. “I know how terrible it was, still is, when my parents died. The war took them, too. Which means we must win it. We must win so that all these good people don’t die for nothing. And soon. So that no more families are ripped apart.” 

James’ parents had been Aurors, when they were alive; they died when James was just eighteen, months before his graduation at Hogwarts, on a mission. James was pulled out of a Potions lesson, then, to the Headmaster’s office, and everyone laughed behind his back because they thought the Marauders had simply pulled another prank. Later that day, when she’d finally found him at the very edge of the Forbidden Forest, James told her all about how Moody had been there as Head of the Auror Department, standing next to Dumbledore, and how he’d known what was up the moment he entered the room, but hadn’t wanted to believe it, had argued for minutes that his parents had to be alive. James is tense now, and Lily knows why. 

“It was just supposed to be a raid,” he recounts in a voice barely above a whisper. Lily’s mother a few rooms down the hall, and they don’t want to disturb her; mostly, though, they don’t want to disturb the momentary calm of the world in any way. “Moody suspected it might get ugly, though, so he had us take precautions. Had us make sure we weren’t going to be contacted. Had us mostly in Muggle clothing, and robes that could easily be left behind. Had us review all the safe spots and apparition codes and everything, for the second time that week. And then we went, and it was ugly. They separated us with a trap in the house, the wall just came down after Sirius and I were past it, and then they attacked on both sides. I barely made it through the anti-Apparition charm they’d put in place. Moody had told us to flee, not to play heroes, but – I don’t know what happened to any of them.” 

He places his hands over her head, pressing it tighter into his chest. Lily hasn’t felt safe in a long time, but this close to James, she can’t help but feel safe. Anxiety still pools in her stomach, and fear for her friends and her family appears permanently stuck to the insides of her lungs, but none of that matters when her entire body is pressed into him and she gets to lose herself at least a little bit.

“They’ll be fine,” she tries, though she doesn’t know, of course she doesn’t, she wasn’t even there, “they were just as well prepared as you were.” 

“Maybe,” James sighs. “I’ll need to go back eventually, but Moody told us to go into hiding for a while if it did go sour, and-” 

“There’s nothing you can do right now,” Lily murmurs. Perhaps she is a little selfish in wanting James all to herself right now. She definitely is a little selfish, she who hasn’t been fighting this war in months, to want them to forget about it on one of these only nights they might have together in a long time. Her mother definitely isn’t well enough for Lily to leave her right now, but that’s another thing Lily doesn’t want to think about. She wants it to be just them, with not a care for anything, to burn bright as they burned in their last few months at Hogwarts. Absentmindedly, she draws little circles on the side of his body, just above his very visible hipbones, where his skin is soft now after the shower he took earlier. He smells of strawberries. 

“You’re right,” James murmurs. 

At Hogwarts, when Dumbledore made them Headboy and Headgirl, and James finally wasn’t a dim-witted, arrogant arse anymore, and Lily wasn’t as uptight as she’d used to be, and as, being forced to talk to each other civilly, they were forced to recognise how many beliefs and values they shared, it had been like they were finally able to fall into each other. Like each was the match to the other’s fire, and together, they made the most beautiful flames. Lily wants that now. Lily wants that fire now. She draws her hand across his skin, hoping that all the thoughts she cannot put into words will drip into his blood through her fingertips if she only touches him for long enough.

James draws in a sharp breath. 

“You know,” he says, voice raw, in the way it always is at night, when the sun that gives him so much energy isn’t out, and a different James appears, a few shades bluer, edges worn, but just as beautiful. “You know, once this is over, I’ll buy us a house, in a magical village somewhere, with a forest nearby, maybe up near Scotland. A house with a garden. And we’ll always be together. And we’ll have flowers and herbs in our kitchen that don’t die. And we’ll do barbecues and invite everyone over. And we’ll have enough rooms for everyone to have their own when they stay the night. And we’ll have an entire library that can be your reading room, and we’ll have a big fireplace in our living room, and windows with white frames and red curtains. And-” 

Lily draws her head up and kisses him hard. 

They haven’t kissed in a very long time. James’ lips are chapped and raw, and for a moment all the strangeness of not having kissed in months forms a bubble between them, but then he kisses her back with a fervour that obliterates all the details. They unravel in each other’s arms, and in the dream of a life together. They burn together in almost complete silence, and it’s a wonder that the world doesn’t notice their blinding light. Perhaps it does notice. Perhaps somewhere, someone spots the flames pouring from them and sees a sign of hope. Perhaps the stars welcome them as a fleeting new companion, just for a short while. 

Lily digs her fingers into James’ skin, and in turn feels his hands all over her, frantic and desperate. She pulls at his t-shirt impatiently. She wants to be closer to him, wants their edges to melt together until they’re only one being, one being strong enough to get through it all. 

This is only the third, maybe fourth time they’ve had sex since they left Hogwarts, and even at Hogwarts, their relationship was new for most of their seventh year, and after the suddenness with which they fell into each other, after all the impatience with which James had been asking her out for years, they took the physical part slow. They’re still mostly new to this, figuring out each other’s bodies, but they melt into each other as though they’d originally been created as just one and then forced apart. 

They lie entangled in each other, their skin gleaming with sweat in the flickering light of a single candle, for a long time, until eventually, they fall asleep.   
James receives a message from Sirius a week, a blissful week, later, asking whether he’s alive, telling him that’s it’s as safe as it will ever be now for them to come out of hiding. James waits for the second message with the codeword that they have for occasions like this, which must always be sent in a different letter, with a different owl, and then takes his leave. 

The house feels like a fish tank without him, wet and crammed and lonely and unsafe. More often than not, Lily feels like she’s being watched, even in rooms without windows, even with the curtains drawn. She and her mother aren’t merpeople; they can’t talk to each other any more now that the air between them has been replaced by water. 

Her mother doesn’t pick up more work at the school again, and Lily doesn’t drop hers. Some days, her mother barely makes it out of bed, only gets up to use the loo, and Lily doesn’t know what to do. She cooks. She keeps the house at least superficially in order. She does the shopping. Before she goes to sleep, she swallows down her anxiety so that it will not sit in her throat and choke her at night, or silently clamber up to her brain and cause nightmares. Most mornings, she has to rush out of bed to the bathroom to vomit that anxiety back up, and bile burns at the back of her throat no matter for how long she scrubs her teeth. 

She still does her Auror-training work-outs and runs her laps, but her body feels achy, as though every day it’s been months since she last worked out, and the stress is wearying her so much that she misses her next period, something that has never happened to her before. 

She rereads all of her old books. She writes letters to James and gives up trying to be funny by the third since he had to leave again. His letters grow more and more concerned, but he can’t be spared in the department for more than the seven hours a night he needs to eat and sleep.

December comes and goes past on the calendar. Lily lives through it like a machine. She buys some Christmas chocolates. They taste like chocolate, but nothing like Christmas. She thinks about buying a tree, but that was so much her Dad’s thing that she can’t bear it. He loved Christmas. And he isn’t there anymore. Neither she nor her mother have the strength to pull off Christmas this year. Lily works a long shift on Christmas Eve, and a longer shift on Christmas Day. She serves tea and coffee to lonely souls, and to a few families who probably don’t celebrate Christmas, and doesn’t play Christmas music even though she was explicitly told to. Most of them stay for a while. Lily and her mother have leftover sandwiches from the coffee shop for dinner both days. 

James writes her a letter. It includes a crude drawing of the Christmas tree he and their friends put up in the flat, and Christmas wishes from all of their friends on the back of the parchment. He doesn’t wish her a merry Christmas. Lily is thankful. He does say, however, that he’s got her present ready for the next time they meet, but not to worry about getting him anything; she ought to stay at home as much as she can. 

Lily presses the letter to her chest and cries. 

As well hidden inside the house as she can be, she practices her wandless magic. She knows it isn’t prudent for her to be using magic at all. There is a reason she is hiding in a Muggle neighbourhood, in a Muggle disguise; there is a reason she does the dishes and the cleaning and the laundry by hand. Magic is always traceable. There’s a childish urge within her, however, to conflate the figurative and the real, and she’s desperate enough to want to believe that conjuring tiny flames in her bare hands will help her soul keep on burning. A part of her knows that she’s holding a small candle to a dying sun. 

James returns in February, by which time Lily is crumbling with the walls around her. Her mother has been sacked a week before from her job because she wasn’t showing up, even though Lily’s father doesn’t need to be physically cared for anymore, and because their patience for their mourning employee has come to an end. Lily’s skipping the third period in a row and starting to fear that this might not be due to stress. The house smells the way it smelled the days before her father died; Lily tries to convince herself she’s just superstitious, only paranoid, but every morning, a moon-sized stone drops from her shoulders when she finds her mother hunched over at the kitchen table, drinking weak tea and not really reading the newspaper. James arrives without warning, as he did the previous time. 

“My love,” he says, the moment she opens the door, “Lily.”

“What colour are my favourite socks?” 

“That’s a trick question,” the hooded figure on her doorstep, _James_ , says. “Because you see, they are different. But then the left one is red, with little golden stars on it, and the right one is blue, with Nifflers. And you can’t wear them the other way around.” 

“It’s supposed to be a trick question, you idiot,” Lily all but chokes out and lets him in.

That night, when they’ve had a quiet dinner with her mother, and they haven’t talked about anything important yet, they’ve barely talked about anything, James proposes to her in her childhood bedroom, dropping down to one knee on her faded blue carpet while she sits on the bed, on about thirty-five two-dimensional teddy bears. He’s wrapped the ring in silly Christmas paper, but its shape is clearly discernible, and so are the words he says.

“Lily, you’re everything to me. I never want anyone, anything to be able to separate us, ever again. I don’t want to ever have to be apart from you in a difficult time. I know I just turned twenty, and you’re nineteen, and we’re too bloody young to marry, and there’s a war going on, but, Lily, there’s a war going on. So – will you marry me?” 

“Of course, you stupid romantic,” Lily says, although she never even meant to marry, although she’s right in that they’re too young. She thinks of the roommate the fear might have in her stomach, the fear as of yet clamouring loudly to throw it out whenever she dares to think of it. She doesn’t know anything about the world, and neither does he, but what good are they apart from each other that they can’t multiply together? And then he’s right. There’s a war going on. His parents are already dead. Her father has succumbed to a war he was never meant to be a soldier in, and her mother won’t be able to bear the grief much longer, although Lily will not yet allow herself to think as far. “I love you.” 

James begins to cry. They spend half an hour sobbing on the carpet, holding on to each other, before Lily can unwrap the ring. It’s simple and beautiful, and a Potter family heirloom, James informs her. Lily breaks into tears again, tears of what emotion she couldn’t even say, and James follows suit. At some point, the tears and comforting strokes morph into more frenzied movements, and they stumble up from the carpet and onto the bed. Desperation melts them together, but there’s hope, too, a silver gleaming sweaty lining between their bodies, a whisper in a kiss.  
Hope is a two-faced creature. 

Lily oversees her mother’s funeral only months after she oversaw her father’s. She writes Petunia a short note and sends it out on its long journey to be delivered by the Muggle post. She doesn’t dare look into the abyss of what might have happened to her, what might have broken within her, if James hadn’t been there the night her mother quietly went in her sleep. She quits her job. She charms every valuable item in the house down to a tiny size, as though she wanted to furnish a dollhouse as a morbid memorial, and stows everything away in a suitcase, on which she performed an undetectable extension charm a long time ago. She leaves those pieces of furniture without memories attached to them, which are few; she stores all of Petunia’s things in Vernon’s parents’ house. She does all of this mechanically. She sells the house for less than it is probably worth.

In the meantime, James tells her about the war. Sometimes, he tells tales of missions they were sent out on, missions that went well. He tells her the tale of an elderly Muggleborn woman who’d been living quietly in a Muggle village since she graduated from Hogwarts, providing the people thereof and of the neighbouring villages and towns with herbal remedies, whom they transported to a safe house days before there was an attack on her house. He tells her the tale of a small boy living in hiding with his parents, to whom they delivered his Hogwarts letter. He throws in the occasional funny story. Lily learns of the mayhem that occurred when the Chinese restaurant downstairs closed for two weeks because the owner took a trip to China, and manages to smile at the story of Sirius Black attempting and failing to cook after a day of Moody’s training. He never tells entire tales of terror, but bits and pieces litter his stories like broken furniture strewn across the living room of a family they weren’t able to save. At night, she traces his bruises and burns and faint scars and he whispers to her where they came from. 

She doesn’t have the courage to tell him she might be pregnant, although her belly quietly grows in proportion with her certainty. 

They get married at nine-fifteen in the morning, unceremoniously, by a Ministry official who used to be good friends with James’ parents, and promises to keep it all quiet as a favour to their son. The elderly man looks at them with sad eyes as they sign the marriage certificate, and as Lily slips a matching ring to the one she is already wearing onto James’ finger. As they leave the office, edging out of the Ministry by way of rarely-used hallways and a side-exit, James promises her a fairy-tale wedding once the war is over, and Lily, who has never cared to imagine herself in a too-large-for-comfort white dress with flowers all around her, smiles, and tells him that they’ll have the biggest cake the world has ever seen. 

When everything is taken care of, Lily, carrying only material remains from her childhood home, not even her family’s last name anymore, returns to the London flat with James, who has already absented himself from missions far too long. Their friends welcome her warmly, but she barely sees any of them during the next few days, except at night, when they wolf down the dinner she makes, thank her a million times, mumble something about training, already half asleep, and barely make it to their mattresses. She’s glad to be with them again, to know they’re safe every night, but she still feels out of place. With the Ministry almost fully under control of the Death Eaters, this is no time to resume Auror training. With Britain almost fully under control, this is no time for her, Muggleborn as she is, to apply for any job. She doesn’t dare leave the flat except to hurry down to the store to buy food. 

She’s back at least at the fringes of action, but she doesn’t know what to do, anyways, and doesn’t know what to say. Silence eats her up more and more. She searches her spell books for anything to help her, but of course they wouldn’t list such a thing as an Abortion spell. She doesn’t dare ask Alice.

It is eleven o’clock at night on a Thursday late in March when Alice and Frank inform them that Alice is pregnant, and although it was obviously an accident, they’re so young, and these aren’t exactly times to raise a child, they’re keeping it, because otherwise, they’d feel like it was just another life the war has taken from them. Lily breaks down crying, right there at the kitchen table, before she manages to say a word to Alice and Frank. Everyone rushes to her. Sirius prudently pries a knife she’d been cutting carrots with from her fingers, and Alice and Marlene hold her up, and out of the corner of her eye she sees James just standing there, and despite the fact that he’s completely blurry, she sees realisation dawn on him. 

“You didn’t tell me,” he whispers at night, without any reproach in his voice, once everyone’s calmed down and the flat is dark, “why didn’t you tell me?” 

“I couldn’t find the right time,” Lily murmurs, but she can’t even keep half the truth from James. “I knew you would want to keep the child, and I wasn’t sure if I could bear that. I’m still not sure if I can- and I-” 

“Lily,” James whispers, “of course I want to keep the child, it is our child, but I would never force you to keep it if you don’t want to. This is still your decision, I just wish – well, I just wish you would have let me know this was even a decision you were making. I’m sorry I wasn’t there enough. I can’t believe I never figured it out.” 

“It’s not your fault,” Lily says, and she believes herself. “And Alice and Frank are right. We should keep the child.” 

She sees the glow of James’ eyes even in the dark of the room they share with Sirius and Remus, who are sound asleep on the mattresses they’ve pushed together, and she knows she’s made the right decision. He presses his warm hand to her stomach and strokes it gently. There is so much love in James, even after all that has happened to him. There is so much hope. And now, the child must be carrying that hope, too. 

“But we can’t all stay here, like this,” Lily adds. “This is no place for a child. It’s not safe enough.”

“We’ll figure something out,” James murmurs. “For now, I just want to hold you and our child. We’ll figure something out once we’ve slept.” 

He leaves before she can properly wake up next morning, whispering a goodbye that reaches her somewhere on the bridge between the land of dreams and that of waking, and pressing a soft kiss to her stomach. By the time sleep has completely cleared out from Lily’s head and bones and eyes, everyone is gone. With nobody around, the flat seems almost big, its rooms mostly filled with mattresses, piles of clothes and emptiness. A rare bit of London sunlight filters in through the dirty window in what could probably be a living room. 

Lily sits at the kitchen table. She slowly pours cornflakes into a bowl, slowly covers them in milk, and slowly eats. The chair creaks every time she shifts her weight. Discarded bowls of cereal pile up in the sink. The flat, with its bare mattresses and lack of furniture, with all their belongings constantly shrunk and packed, partly because there’s no space, but party just in case, is the embodiment of a temporal solution. None of them mean to stay. When they’re not all crammed around the kitchen table, it doesn’t feel like home. The flat is a something-that-will-be-over soon; it is hardly more permanent than a subway car, albeit a little more spacious. It is no place to raise a child. Where are they supposed to go? 

Now that she’s accepted it and actually admitted out loud that there’s something growing within her, she can feel the child. It isn’t moving or anything, but it’s there, a clear presence within her. Lily cannot bear the thought that once this tiny being is no longer harboured within her body, it will be homeless. She wants the child to be safe, as the child within herself longs to be safe once more, the child that she still is in some way. Lily takes a deep breath. The flame within her flickers at the thought that she is basically just a child herself. She takes another deep breath. But she’s not a child anymore, is she? How could she be, after living through these past months? How could she be, after burying her parents? The truth is that she hasn’t felt properly safe since Hogwarts, except with James, but that is of course an entirely different dimension of safety, and she isn’t confident she can provide the same sort of safety for a child in an environment this volatile.

By the time she has finished her cornflakes, the thought is stuck in her mind. She has to go to Hogwarts after all. 

She writes a note to Professor Dumbledore, something scrambling and definitely not very professional about being in a bit of a situation, and about seeking employment at Hogwarts, and whether he’s got any position open. Maybe she could be assistant librarian? She sends the note without allowing herself to reflect on its contents, because a part of her knows she wouldn’t dare to send it if she did.

A reply is swiftly delivered. The owl can’t have flown far; Lily has only just dried the last bowl when it knocks on the kitchen window again. Dumbledore writes in his usual loopy script that he is at the Ministry, that he has just spoken to James and that he will fetch her on his way back to Hogwarts. She is not to worry, but she is also not to leave the flat. Lily wonders what James has told him, and wonders at Dumbledore’s urgency; but Dumbledore has always been eccentric, and has grown more eccentric with every year of his being Headmaster, which he became after their first year. There’s a strange comfort in letting him pull whatever strings he’s pulling, and trusting that something will work out, whatever it may be. Lily tidies up the flat. She doesn’t dare open the windows to air out the bedsheets, or to use magic to charm the dust away, but she cleans as thoroughly as possible with the minimal amount of equipment she possesses. 

Dumbledore arrives an hour later. He’s wearing the least noticeable robes Lily has ever seen on him, a discreet dark blue, and carries a rather large old key on a string in the hand he used to knock, which is still halfway lifted when Lily opens the door. He has also brought James.

“It is good to see you in good health, Miss Evans,” he greets her, and then adds, with a twinkling in his eye: “Although I should rather call you, as I have just been informed, Mrs. Potter.” 

“It’s good to see you, Professor Dumbledore,” Lily says. “Come in.” 

“Ah, but you must call me Albus now,” Dumbledore says. He steps into the small flat and eyes the mattresses and the small shelves stuffed with tiny contents curiously. “I insist. You will be packed soon, I assume? Our portkey is leaving in about seven minutes.” 

“Nearly done, Prof- Albus,” Lily says, hasting to add: “But then call me Lily. Please.” 

“Certainly,” Dumbledore says. He turns around, probably feigning to inspect their kitchen with curiosity, since there’s really not much to see, and Lily can finally greet James. There’s time only for a short hug; they rush to throw all of their belongings into two suitcases, which would be tremendously heavy if they didn’t have built-in light-as-a-feather-charms, even when they’re not half full, and hurry to meet Dumbledore in the kitchen. The man is inspecting the writing on a box of Muggle cereal with great earnestness, but he puts it down when they walk into the kitchen.

“I have allowed myself to leave a note for your friends,” he says. “Now, please place a finger each to this key and hold on tight to your luggage.” 

A few uncomfortable seconds later, a journey just outside the boundaries of space and time but warring against them still, like sneaking past the edges of their territory in constant fear of being caught and attacked, they’re no longer standing in a dusty Muggle kitchen, but in Dumbledore’s office at Hogwarts. While Lily is still reorienting herself in regular spatial dimensions, Dumbledore takes a seat behind his desk and conjures up two more chairs with an easy flick of his hand. It takes a moment before Lily feels confident enough about her perception of up and down and left and right, and confident that her stomach knows, too, to sit down; the pregnancy seems to be taking a toll on her toleration of portkeys. 

“First of all, I must congratulate you,” Dumbledore says. “Raising a child is a beautiful endeavour, and I command your bravery for taking on this journey in these already trying times. You are acting as true Gryffindors. A child is a creature that may bring great hope. I fear that this truth may apply especially to this child, which is why I have brought you here immediately. There has been a prophecy.”

Lily swallows hard. The relief she felt just moments ago when it sunk in that she is at Hogwarts again, in the safest place in the world, congeals into worry again. It strikes the bottom of her stomach, and the resonating boom is a thought: this ice-cold stone of worry will be her child’s playmate before it is even born, and there’s nothing she can do about it. Her second thought is of Alice and Frank.

“A child born at the end of July, a child born to parents who have defied Voldemort and lived, will be the one with the power to vanquish Voldemort. The prophecy has been made to myself by our new divination teacher, who, I fear, truly possesses the seer’s gift, although it may not seem so most of the time, and I believe it to be genuine. Now, I also believe, according to what James has told me when I ran into him at the Ministry this morning, that your child may well fit this description. Voldemort has asked you multiple times to join his ranks, I presume, James? And during your Auror training, have you not defied him continually? Have you, Lily, in spite of your blood status, not been asked to join his ranks, at least via the messenger Severus Snape, and have you not denied him and even gone so far as call him a hypocrite?” 

They both nod silently. 

Technically, Lily thinks, if her calculations are correct and if everything goes well, the child should be born at the end of August, but that is not a very long time after the end of July, and the art of prophecy is a fickle art. The child may always be early, too. Lily herself was, as her mother tells her, early by almost an entire month. Her parents used to say that she was so eager to be out in the world and discover it that she couldn’t wait in the womb a day longer. Petunia used to say, from about the time when Lily was nine or ten and it became apparent that something was different about her, that Lily hadn’t been able to wait to take her place. The memory makes her feel eleven years old. Her body, that of a woman now as clearly as a body can be a woman’s, grows large on her, as though it were a costume and she merely playing dress-up. 

“We must act immediately,” Dumbledore says. “I will organise a safe house for you. Because there have been numerous attacks on the Order’s usual safe houses, despite our heightened precautions, I suggest the use of the Fidelius charm. I trust that you are familiar with this particular charm. If I remember correctly, the larger points of its workings are taught at NEWT level, although the finer points of course are only studied by few. I hereby offer to be your secret keeper myself, but you may choose whomsoever you deem fit to the task. We will perform the charm as soon as possible; until then, we can surely find accommodation for you at Hogwarts.” 

“Sir-” Lily blurts, “I mean, Albus – thank you very much for your help, really, but there’s – Alice is pregnant, too. Her child should be born around the end of July, and she and Frank are just as active in the Order as we are.” 

Consternation clouds Dumbledore’s face. 

“Well,” he says gravely, “the Order will have to bear the loss of four of its most important members for a time. Two safe houses should hardly be more difficult to organise than one. I shall inform Alice Prewett and Frank Longbottom immediately and bring them here as well. Make yourselves comfortable while I am gone; do not hesitate to call for tea and food from the kitchens. Fawkes!”

Dumbledore vanishes in a burst of phoenix-flames. In the silence he leaves behind, the emotional supernova within Lily’s chest explodes into a vacuum, and it is all she can do to force her rips to hold her chest together. She’s been locked into silence and solitude for so long that she is startled into remembrance that this is a silence already broken off from her sister solitude, and thus a breakable silence. 

“So,” James says. The vacuum within Lily’s lungs fills with a rush of air that smells strongly of magic and faintly of ashes and rain. “Back at Hogwarts.” 

“Do you feel like any of this is actually happening to you?” Lily asks. There’s a hint of quiet desperation seeping through her voice, like colour seeping out from a teabag into an ocean. James turns in his armchair to fully look at her, his girlfriend, no, his wife, his love, carrying their child. He looks at her, red hair cut unevenly, features blank in the way of a stolen moment of calm in a storm, looks at her not looking at him, and still sees her familiar fire burning, that fire that always drew him to her. And now there’s a child within her, too, a child that may be burning as a flame entirely of its own. She’s not looking at him, though.

She’s not looking at him because she’s afraid that the way she feels distanced from herself, a spectator on the side-lines of a puppet theatre, may make him feel distanced too, and that he might look into her eyes and see oceans of green between the two of them. 

“What do you mean?” James asks. He reaches for her hand, which is a little cold and a little warm and fits into his with practiced ease. 

“Like this is all happening too fast to understand anything,” Lily says. “One moment we’re at Hogwarts, and the next we’re not, and we’re fighting a war, and then you’re fighting a war and I’m not, I’m just watching the way the world is being torn apart from its fringes, all the threads coming loose, and then I’m burying both of my parents within months and then I’m pregnant and I’m not even twenty yet, James, and I don’t understand anything that is happening anymore. I don’t know whether I even want to be in control. I don’t know anything. And I guess I should be happy now, happy that we’re safe, happy that Dumbledore is working things out, but I just can’t feel anything anymore, and I’m so tired. It’s like all these past months are still stuck within me, or, no, like I’m still stuck to all these past months and it’s stretching me so thin. I don’t even know where I am.”

She looks at James, then, the ocean of green poured out between them anyways, a tsunami of mind-vomit for him sift through. She should have known that James, strong as he is, wouldn’t be swept away.

“You know I love you, right?” he asks. 

Lily nods. 

“And you know you’re with me, right?” 

Lily nods again. James takes both of her hands in both of his now, guiding her so that they’re facing each other. 

“And you trust me, right?” 

“More than I ever thought I could trust anyone,” Lily says. 

“Then that’s what you know and where we are right now,” James says. His expression slips for a moment, betraying a whirlwind behind his steadiness. He gives a small laugh. “And we’ll figure out what’s happening. Together. Because truth to be told, I have no idea, either. I just know – I just know that together, we’ll get through this. And then, we’ll have our house with a garden and herbs in the kitchen and a big fireplace. I promise. And who knows what that safehouse is going to be like? We may have our house with a garden and herbs in the kitchen sooner than you think. Although what with the hiding and all, it will be difficult to have everyone over for barbecues.”

“But what about the difficult stuff?” Lily asks in a very quiet voice that betrays how close she is to crumbling into a pile of tears and fear and love and a baby, right on this armchair. “What about feeling the difficult stuff?” 

“We’ll go through that together, too,” James says. “You’re allowed to feel the difficult stuff. You probably should let yourself feel the difficult stuff.” He scrunches up his nose. “It seems that stupid Ministry-issue counsellors are right after all. But, anyways. This is war. No-one is going to downplay that. This is war, and it is terrible and terrifying and none of us have any idea what will become of the world tomorrow, or next week, or in three months, or in two years. But we’ll be there together, whatever happens. And if that’s all we can know – well, there are worse things to know.”

“I love you,” Lily says, and hopes that three over-used words that she nevertheless means wholeheartedly can express all that she can’t find the words to say. 

The difficult stuff is an inextricable part of who she is now, of this entire messy shape of Lily Potter, and Lily is aware that with every bit of it she’s struggling so hard to leave behind in the past months, she’s merely leaving a part of herself behind, and stretching herself so thin she can hardly breathe. A clutter of sadness and loneliness and death and dreariness and emptiness and anxiety is strewn onto the path behind her. She barely dares to look back. She doesn’t know how distorted her shape would become if she reintegrated all these writhing creatures back into it. She doesn’t know if her flame could still burn. She gets up so abruptly that her head spins briefly, and then sinks into James’ chair. Together, they perfectly fill up a space meant for a person-and-a-half.

“Do you think Sirius will do it?” James asks into the silence long after it has become comfortable, more the smooth velvet of a summer night sky than the deceptive quiet that lurks at the bottom of staircases leading to basements. 

“What?” Lily asks. 

“Become our secret keeper. Do you think he’ll do it? Because, well-” James leans closer, his lips almost touching her ear, his breath as he speaks making the hairs on her skin rise to meet him “-this is probably not a good place to say that, but I don’t really want Dumbledore as our secret keeper.”

Lily knows what he means without having to ask. Dumbledore may be the only person in this mess who has any idea what’s going on. Partly, he’s surely a puppet himself, but then there’s this part of him that isn’t so much a puppet as it is a puppet-master, with insight into the strings and the stage and the world beyond, and this makes him not quite of this world, not quite a person. If asked, Lily knows she would say that she trusts Dumbledore, but can a man be fully trusted who doesn’t always seem to be fully a man? The sensation is difficult to express, and the Hogwarts Headmaster’s office with all the portraits lining the walls, feigning sleep as they always do, is not the place to express it. Dumbledore has a larger game in mind than any of them, and a part of Lily is too selfish, too prudent, to want to give herself entirely to the role of his pawn. Dumbledore may have saved the wizarding world once already, during the War with Grindelwald, but the costs were high, then, too. A man with this much power is not a man always concerned with the littler aspects of history.

“He probably will, he’s reckless enough,” she says. A thought occurs to her. “We could make him the child’s godfather.” 

“He would love that. And then he’d be able to come round for barbecues.” 

“Remus would be an option, too, I guess,” Lily muses. “Or Marlene. Or even Peter.” 

“Whoever we choose will become a target sooner or later,” James says. A heaviness settles into his words that wasn’t there before. “Marlene already has her parents to worry about. And Remus has so much on his plate. Dumbledore’s been taking him places. Having him make connections.”

James lowers his voice once more. 

“He won’t tell and he wouldn’t have it mentioned to you, but we think Dumbledore wants him to get closer to the werewolves, so that he can spy on them if they cooperate with Voldemort.”

“But that’s too dangerous!” Lily protests. 

“He’s told me that there’s nothing else for him to do anyways. Sooner or later, he says, once the Ministry actually looks at who they’ve employed, they’re going to kick him out of Auror training. He’s convinced no-one will hire him, ever.” 

“That doesn’t mean he has to become one of them,” Lily says, her protest feeble now. This is Remus they’re talking about. Remus, who will have made up his mind in silence. Remus, who will have all his reasons figured out. 

“He won’t,” James says grimly. “He promised.” 

They skip over a discussion of Peter because they both know that he isn’t really an option, too.

That night, the fire in the staffroom’s fireplace burns high. The heavy wooden table has been temporarily removed, as have the chairs; in their stead lie two large mattresses and four people, barely older than the oldest students in the castle’s dormitories, and its walls themselves seem to want to protect them, dancing in and out with the dance of the flames, itching to provide cover, fearing to choke. Lily listens to James’ even breathing, and his even heartbeats, and gives her flame away to the eager fireplace to hold for the night, relaxing her entire body into the softness of Hogwarts’ familiar sheets and into James’ familiar embrace. She drifts off into sleep within seconds. The fireplace is careful to preserve her flame all night. It slips back into her around dawn. 

Dumbledore sees them to their safehouses separately after a breakfast the houseelves deliver to their makeshift beds. Alice and Frank look no less worn or overwhelmed than Lily and James, but still, a clueless passer-by could have assumed they were senior students who had spent a sleepless and careless night in the staffroom, the last ones remaining of a party where it would probably be the least suspected. A typical schoolchildren’s trick, nothing more. Perhaps a shot or two of firewhiskey too many. A passer-by could have easily missed the truth. 

Many a passers-by will miss the truth about the house Dumbledore takes Lily and James too, as always via private portkey. The sensation is even more terrible than the day before. Lily tastes bile at the back of her throat. It is a nice house; exactly the kind of house Lily never expected to move to until she was at least thirty (but there are still thirteen days to her twentieth birthday now), with white walls and a dark-red tiled roof and a little garden in the front that looks dishevelled, but not completely out of order, and a large garden at the back, and a kitchen that will have sunlight pouring into it in the mornings, and a living room that will have sunlight soaking it in the late afternoon. It has two bedrooms upstairs and a large bathroom. It has no basement, just an airy, dust-covered attic. 

It is where they will be locked up for months.

Dumbledore leaves them alone, warning them not to step off the premises or into the garden just yet, and goes off to fetch Sirius. Ample precautions have been taken to safeguard the house on the outskirts of Godric’s Hollow, but it isn’t invisible yet. 

For a moment, in the large and largely empty living room, they allow themselves to forget everything looming just behind the low wooden fence. James lifts Lily up high, ignoring her protests that she doesn’t really mean anyways, and swivels her around until the laughter morphs into real protest and he lets her down, both of them dizzy, and, for a moment, bright. The house has a large fireplace. 

Sirius agrees to be their secretkeeper. 

He suggests that they switch to Peter, not because he doesn’t want to do it, not because he won’t go into hiding for them as soon as there’s the slightest chance he might have to, and not because he’s afraid of being attacked (as he assures them in a manner untypically serious for the Sirius they know), but because he’ll be less suspected, and for wizards, there are always methods of drawing the truth from someone, especially for dark wizards. He’d rather kill himself, he says, and Lily and James both wince at the realisation that this is what they’re putting him through, both simultaneously considering accepting Dumbledore’s offer after all and then shuddering at the thought. But, even though he’d rather kill himself than give them away (the to-be-killed hangs briefly around at the corners of the room, cloaks itself in a blue curtain, gives off a cackle and vanishes), he’s the obvious person they’d choose, and Peter is not. 

With heavy hearts and stomachs, they insist that they want him as a secretkeeper. The Fidelius charm is performed. 

Dumbledore sticks around for a little bit while Sirius leaves, cheerfully, even though the entire burden of their house and lives and child now rests partly on his shoulders, to get them some groceries. He’s got a list that they’ve written up for him, and he does buy all the items featured on there, but they do also end up with much more Muggle beer and Muggle chocolate and other Muggle sweets that they ever requested, because Sirius insists that they need to use their time to try everything and inform him whether it’s any good. Lily comments, drily, that she can’t even drink beer, pregnant as she is, and Sirius tilts his head to one side sheepishly. 

Dumbledore has other things to bestow on them before he will leave to get Alice and Frank where they need to be. 

He informs them that James’ family’s old houseelf, Elly, will be around within a day to do their shopping for them and generally help around the house. The elf, having been at Hogwarts since James’ parents’ death, is delighted to be back with ‘Young Master James’, and takes an immediate liking to Lily, and although she feels queasy about having a houseelf around, it’s a good solution to the problem of not being able to leave the house that doesn’t involve Sirius doing all their shopping.

Dumbledore tells them that their main mission for the time being is to keep themselves safe, but that he’ll inform them of anything they can do to help from here; he suggests that it would be good to keep a large stock of potion ingredients, and to revise their school knowledge enough to provide the Order with a diverse array of healing potions. But otherwise, he insists again, they should just keep themselves safe. For a rare moment, it is clear in his countenance that he knows how young they truly are, these soldiers he hand-picked to fight a war. 

He also asks James for his Invisibility Cloak. 

James hesitates. Lily can almost hear him think of their conversations about the myth and legend and lore of wizards, to much of which he introduced her himself on endless patrol and other sleepless nights; of their conversations about the last Wizarding War and Dumbledore’s role in it. She can feel the uneasiness at the seeming randomness of the request, and the time at which it is asked. James says no, and that he’s sorry, but that it is what he has left of his father, and that he’d much rather keep it himself. 

Dumbledore leaves them to an empty house soon after that.

“This feels like a good place to keep a fire alive,” Lily thinks aloud, and when James looks up at her quizzically from where he’s inspecting their new bed, waves the statement away. “We didn’t even say good-bye to Marlene and Remus and Peter.” 

“We’re not completely isolated, we don’t have to,” James says. “Sirius can bring them round.”

“Maybe it would be a bad omen to say good-bye,” Lily says, but there’s a nagging thought at the back of her head that his war isn’t fought by omens, it is fought by people, and that she should tell those people she loves them before the fight may burn out in them. 

They may not be completely isolated, but they’re at the far edges of a war again. News reach them in dislocated bits and pieces, communicated by Sirius when he talks to them via the mirrors he and James enchanted during their sixth year, or by the houseelf, Elly, that supplies them with groceries, potions ingredients and letters sent by Dumbledore himself. They wake to the peaceful silence of a small town, and they fall asleep to it. They watch the sunset sometimes from the corner of the backyard. They watch the Muggles hurrying by on the street from their bedroom window. They brew pain relief potions and potions to stay awake for long shifts or missions and all the most commonly needed antidotes. They cook together. Lily writes anonymous articles to the Daily Prophet about the impeding catastrophe for the Muggle world and the precarious balance that exists between their worlds if this war doesn’t end soon, which the paper never publishes. She keeps reading it anyways, always several newspapers at a time because Sirius brings them over in stacks, so that she can keep track of the corruption of the Ministry, which is evident in the articles’ oscillation from denial that there is a war to outright anti-Muggle propaganda. 

They live on the bleeding edges of a war. Terror comes and goes like a terrible tide, washing news up to their far-away shore and flattening out the traces of it in the sand. Some days, restlessness seems to take hold of the entire world, and they find themselves barely talking, holding their breaths. Some days, they almost forget that the war is going on. 

The months of spring feel stolen to Lily, stolen from a life she hasn’t earned yet. They’re preliving a future that they should have been theirs ten years from now, and at night, the ugly face of a thought looms at the kitchen window and whispers that this is the universe granting them a distorted glimpse of a future they’re not going to have. 

Lily’s belly grows. 

The visits from their friends grow less frequent as more and more earthquakes shake their house that make their collection of cups rattle in its cupboard even though the actual, physical earth is still. Remus keeps on being send out with the werewolves. Sirius is livid about this, but he’s had to grow up a lot himself, and he doesn’t prevent Remus from doing this job he feels he has to do. Resignation creeps into his anger and his joy alike, and Lily only hopes that the time when he’ll get to shake it off again is soon. Peter becomes weird and distanced and seems to be aging faster than any of them are, his hair falling out and his skin sagging and his laugh a little maniacal. Marlene’s parents are attacked by Death Eaters, so she spends all of her free time at St. Mungo’s. The war, this much they can tell even from its side-lines, from where it blurs into a messy, desperate, frantic sort of almost-and-not-quite peace, is spiralling out of control. Muggles scurry past ever faster, shopping bags full. There are less children in the streets even on sunny days. It would be so easy to forget to burn here, to forget everything, to fall into the strings and act out daily the play of two people retired before they ever began to work, with not a care in the world, every decision made. It would be easy if there weren’t the child growing within her, their child that they must keep burning for. 

And Lily’s belly grows. In mid-July, she’s waddling rather than walking around the house. James starts to call her his penguin. She rolls her eyes and smiles. The baby has started to move inside her; whenever it kicks her, James’ eyes light up and he claims it will probably be a great Chaser. Lily, with her face scrunched up in pain, says that it feels more like a future Beater to her. James gets Sirius to buy the baby sets upon sets of tiny Quidditch rompers. They begin to prepare for the birth, even though it is not supposed to happen for five more weeks.

Sirius has to fetch a midwife in the middle of the night, at two a.m. on the 31st of June, to help deliver the baby that wants out a month early, and they’re just glad that Alice and Frank, whose baby arrived not even twenty-four hours before Lily went into labour, told them the name of theirs, a friend of Alice’s also training to be a Healer.

It's a boy. He’s small and slight, but strong, and the Healer, although she immediately administers a potion to him that compensates for the month of development in the womb he missed, tells them to their relief that he will not need in-hospital care. She leaves them with instructions on how to brew the potion, which they’re to feed him every day during the first two months, and congratulations on a boy with such a will to live. His heart beats strong and steady, like a tiny birds’. He cried when he was just out of the womb, as she assures them babies are supposed to, but once he opened his eyes, he only looked at them in silent wonder. His fire is bright in his eyes even though he is only minutes old.

Sirius is still in tears when he leaves. 

They name their little boy Harry almost on impulse, and laugh with tired delight when he immediately reaches out a tiny hand at the sound of his name, like he wants to give them a wave.

It will take their boy, who might already be carrying the weight of the world on his tiny shoulders before he can even carry the weight of his own head, courage to burn. But his flame is already a wildfire.

“This one’s a Gryffindor,” James mutters as he holds their son to his chest, stroking the soft fluff on his head. “I can feel the lion within him.” 

Lily agrees.

**THE BEGINNING.**


End file.
